IN APRIL 1985, the general secretaries of the communist and workers'
parties of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic
Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Poland, and Romania gathered in Warsaw
to sign a protocol extending the effective term of the 1955 Treaty on Friendship,
Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, which originally established the Soviet-led
political-military alliance in Eastern Europe. Their action ensured that
the Warsaw Pact, as it is commonly known, will remain part of the international
political and military landscape well into the future. The thirtieth anniversary
of the Warsaw Pact and its renewal make a review of its origins and evolution
particularly appropriate.

The Warsaw Pact alliance of the East European socialist states is the
nominal counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on
the European continent (see fig. A, this Appendix). Unlike NATO, founded
in 1949, however, the Warsaw Pact does not have an independent organizational
structure but functions as part of the Soviet Ministry of Defense. In fact,
throughout the more than thirty years since it was founded, the Warsaw Pact
has served as one of the Soviet Union's primary mechanisms for keeping its
East European allies under its political and military control. The Soviet
Union has used the Warsaw Pact to erect a facade of collective decision
making and action around the reality of its political domination and military
intervention in the internal affairs of its allies. At the same time, the
Soviet Union also has used the Warsaw Pact to develop East European socialist
armies and harness them to its military strategy.

Since its inception, the Warsaw Pact has reflected the changing pattern
of Soviet-East European relations and manifested problems that affect all
alliances. The Warsaw Pact has evolved into something other than the mechanism
of control the Soviet Union originally intended it to be, and it has become
increasingly less dominated by the Soviet Union since the 1960s. The organizational
structure of the Warsaw Pact has grown and has provided a forum for greater
intra-alliance debate, bargaining, and conflict between the Soviet Union
and its allies over the issues of national independence, policy autonomy,
and East European participation in alliance decision making. While the Warsaw
Pact retains its internal function in Soviet-East European relations, its
non-Soviet members have also developed sufficient military capabilities
to become useful adjuncts of Soviet power against NATO in Europe.

THE SOVIET ALLIANCE SYSTEM, 1943-55

Long before the establishment of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, the Soviet
Union had molded the East European states into an alliance serving its security
interests. While liberating Eastern Europe from Nazi Germany in World War
II, the Red Army established political and military control over that region.
The Soviet Union's size, economic weight, and sheer military power made
its domination inevitable in this part of Europe, which historically had
been dominated by great powers. The Soviet Union intended to use Eastern
Europe as a buffer zone for the forward defense of its western borders and
to keep threatening ideological influences at bay. Continued control of
Eastern Europe became second only to defense of the homeland in the hierarchy
of Soviet security priorities. The Soviet Union ensured its control of the
region by turning the East European countries into subjugated allies.

The Organization of East European National Units, 1943- 45

During World War II, the Soviet Union began to build what Soviet sources
refer to as history's first coalition of a progressive type when it organized
or reorganized the armies of Eastern Europe to fight with the Red Army against
the German Wehrmacht. The command and control procedures established in
this military alliance would serve as the model on which the Soviet Union
would build the Warsaw Pact after 1955. During the last years of the war,
Soviet commanders and officers gained valuable experience in directing multinational
forces that would later be put to use in the Warsaw Pact. The units formed
between 1943 and 1945 also provided the foundation on which the Soviet Union
could build postwar East European national armies.

The Red Army began to form, train, and arm Polish and Czechoslovak national
units on Soviet territory in 1943. These units fought with the Red Army
as it carried its offensive westward into German-occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia
and then into Germany itself. By contrast, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania
were wartime enemies of the Soviet Union. Although ruled by ostensibly fascist
regimes, these countries allied with Nazi Germany mainly to recover territories
lost through the peace settlements of World War I or seized by the Soviet
Union under the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. However,
by 1943 the Red Army had destroyed the Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Romanian
forces fighting alongside the Wehrmacht. In 1944 it occupied Bulgaria, Hungary,
and Romania, and shortly thereafter it began the process of transforming
the remnants of their armies into allied units that could re-enter the war
on the side of the Soviet Union. These allied units represented a mix of
East European nationals fleeing Nazi occupation, deportees from Soviet-occupied
areas, and enemy prisoners-of-war. Red Army political officers organized
extensive indoctrination programs in the allied units under Soviet control
and purged any politically suspect personnel. In all, the Soviet Union formed
and armed more than 29 divisions and 37 brigades or regiments, which included
more than 500,000 East European troops.

The allied national formations were directly subordinate to the headquarters
of the Soviet Supreme High Command and its executive body, the Soviet General
Staff. Although the Soviet Union directly commanded all allied units, the
Supreme High Command included one representative from each of the East European
forces. Lacking authority, these representatives simply relayed directives
from the Supreme High Command and General Staff to the commanders of East
European units. While all national units had so-called Soviet advisers,
some Red Army officers openly discharged command and staff responsibilities
in the East European armies. Even when commanded by East European officers,
non-Soviet contingents participated in operations against the Wehrmacht
only as part of Soviet fronts.

The Development of Socialist Armies in Eastern Europe, 1945- 55

At the end of World War II, the Red Army occupied Bulgaria, Romania,
Hungary, Poland, and eastern Germany, and Soviet front commanders headed
the Allied Control Commission in each of these occupied countries. The Soviet
Union gave its most important occupation forces a garrison status when it
established the Northern Group of Forces (NGF) in 1947 and the Group of
Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG) in 1949. By 1949 the Soviet Union had concluded
twenty-year bilateral treaties of friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance
with Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. These treaties
prohibited the East European regimes from entering into relations with states
hostile to the Soviet Union, officially made these countries Soviet allies,
and granted the Soviet Union rights to a continued military presence on
their territory. The continued presence of Red Army forces guaranteed Soviet
control of these countries. By contrast, the Soviet Union did not occupy
either Albania or Yugoslavia during or after the war, and both countries
remained outside direct Soviet control.

The circumstances of Soviet occupation facilitated the installation of
communist-dominated governments called "people's democracies"
in Eastern Europe. The indoctrinated East European troops that had fought
with the Red Army to liberate their countries from Nazi occupation became
politically useful to the Soviet Union as it established socialist states
in Eastern Europe. The East European satellite regimes depended entirely
on Soviet military power--and the continued deployment of 1 million Red
Army soldiers--to stay in power. In return, the new East European political
and military elites were obliged to respect Soviet political and security
interests in the region.

While transforming the East European governments, the Soviet Union also
continued the process of strengthening its political control over the East
European armed forces and reshaping them along Soviet military lines after
World War II. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union instituted a system of
local communist party controls over the military based on the Soviet model.
The East European communist parties thoroughly penetrated the East European
military establishments to ensure their loyalty to the newly established
political order. At the same time, the Soviet Union built these armies up
to support local security and police forces against domestic disorder or
other threats to communist party rule. Reliable East European military establishments
could be counted on to support communist rule and, consequently, ensure
continued Soviet control of Eastern Europe. In fact, in the late 1940s and
the 1950s the Soviet Union was more concerned about cultivating and monitoring
political loyalty in its East European military allies than increasing their
utility as combat forces.

The postwar military establishments in Eastern Europe consisted of rival
communist and noncommunist wartime antifascist resistance movements, national
units established on Soviet territory during the war, prewar national military
commands, and various other armed forces elements that spent the war years
in exile or fighting in the West. Using the weight of the Red Army and its
occupation authority, the Soviet Union purged or co-opted the noncommunist
nationalists in the East European armies and thereby eliminated a group
likely to oppose their restructuring along Soviet lines. In the case of
communist forces, the Soviet Union trusted and promoted personnel who had
served in the national units formed on its territory over native communists
who had fought in the East European underground organizations independent
of Soviet control.

After 1948 the East European armies adopted regular political education
programs. This Soviet-style indoctrination was aimed primarily at raising
communist party membership within the officer corps and building a military
leadership cadre loyal to the socialist system and the national communist
regime. Unquestionable political loyalty was more important than professional
competence for advancement in the military hierarchy. Appropriate class
origin became the principal criterion for admission to the East European
officer corps and military schools. The Soviet Union and national communist
party regimes transformed the East European military establishments into
a vehicle of upward mobility for the working class and peasantry, who were
unaccustomed to this kind of opportunity. Many of the officers in the new
East European armed forces supported the new regimes because their newly
acquired professional and social status hinged on the continuance of communist
party rule.

The Soviet Union assigned trusted national communist party leaders to
the most important East European military command positions despite their
lack of military qualifications. The East European ministries of defense
established political departments on the model of the Main Political Administration
of the Soviet Army and Navy. Throughout the 1950s, prewar East European
communists served as political officers, sharing command prerogatives with
professional officers and evaluating their loyalty to the communist regime
and compliance with its directives. Heavily armed paramilitary forces under
the control of the East European internal security networks became powerful
rivals for the national armies and checked their potentially great influence
within the political system. The Soviet foreign intelligence apparatus also
closely monitored the allied national military establishments.

Despite the great diversity of the new Soviet allies in terms of military
history and traditions, the Sovietization of the East European national
armies, which occurred between 1945 and the early 1950s, followed a consistent
pattern in every case. The Soviet Union forced its East European allies
to emulate Soviet Army ranks and uniforms and abandon all distinctive national
military customs and practices; these allied armies used all Soviet-made
weapons and equipment. The Soviet Union also insisted on the adoption of
Soviet Army organization and tactics within the East European armies. Following
the precedent established during World War II, the Soviet Union assigned
Soviet officers to duty at all levels of the East European national command
structures, from the general (main) staffs down to the regimental level,
as its primary means of military control. Although officially termed advisers,
these Soviet Army officers generally made the most important decisions within
the East European armies. Direct Soviet control over the national military
establishments was most complete in strategically important Poland. Soviet
officers held approximately half the command positions in the postwar Polish
Army despite the fact that few spoke Polish. Soviet officers and instructors
staffed the national military academies, and the study of Russian became
mandatory for East European army officers. The Soviet Union also accepted
many of the most promising and eager East European officers into Soviet
mid-career military institutions and academies for the advanced study essential
to their promotion within the national armed forces command structures.

Despite Soviet efforts to develop political and military instruments
of control and the continued presence of Soviet Army occupation forces,
the Soviet Union still faced resistance to its domination of Eastern Europe.
The Soviet troops in the GSFG acted unilaterally when the East German Garrisoned
People's Police refused to crush the June 1953 workers' uprising in East
Berlin. This action set a precedent for the Soviet use of force to retain
control of its buffer zone in Eastern Europe.

East-West Diplomacy and the Formation of the Warsaw Pact

In May 1955, the Soviet Union institutionalized its East European alliance
system when it gathered together representatives from Albania, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania in Warsaw to sign the multilateral
Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, which was identical
to their existing bilateral treaties with the Soviet Union. Initially, the
Soviets claimed that the Warsaw Pact was a direct response to the inclusion
of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in NATO in 1955. The formation
of a legally defined, multilateral alliance organization also reinforced
the Soviet Union's claim to power status as the leader of the world socialist
system, enhanced its prestige, and legitimized its presence and influence
in Eastern Europe. However, as events inside the Soviet alliance developed,
this initial external impetus for the formation of the Warsaw Pact lost
its importance, and the Soviet Union found a formal alliance useful for
other purposes. The Soviet Union created a structure for dealing with its
East European allies more efficiently when it superimposed the multilateral
Warsaw Pact on their existing bilateral treaty ties.

In the early 1950s, the United States and its Western allies carried
out an agreement to re-arm West Germany and integrate it into NATO. This
development threatened a vital Soviet foreign policy objective: the Soviet
Union was intent on preventing the resurgence of a powerful German nation
and particularly one allied with the Western powers. In an effort to derail
the admission of West Germany to NATO, the Soviet representative at the
1954 Four-Power Foreign Ministers Conference in Berlin, Viacheslav Molotov,
went so far as to propose the possibility of holding simultaneous elections
in both German states that might lead to a re-unified, though neutral and
unarmed, Germany. At the same time, the Soviet Union also proposed to the
Western powers a general treaty on collective security in Europe and the
dismantling of existing military blocs (meaning NATO). When this tactic
failed and West Germany joined NATO on May 5, 1955, the Soviet Union declared
that West Germany's membership in the Western alliance created a special
threat to Soviet interests. The Soviet Union also declared that this development
made its existing network of bilateral treaties an inadequate security guarantee
and forced the East European socialist countries to "combine efforts
in a strong political and military alliance." On May 14, 1955, the
Soviet Union and its East European allies signed the Warsaw Pact.

While the Soviets had avoided formalizing their alliance to keep the
onus of dividing Europe into opposing blocs on the West, the admission into
NATO of the European state with the greatest potential military power forced
the Soviet Union to take NATO into account for the first time. The Soviet
Union also used West Germany's membership in NATO for propaganda purposes.
The Soviets evoked the threat of a re-armed, "revanchist" West
Germany seeking to reverse its defeat in World War II to remind the East
European countries of their debt to the Soviet Union for their liberation,
their need for Soviet protection against a recent enemy, and their corresponding
duty to respect Soviet security interests and join the Warsaw Pact.

The Soviet Union had important reasons for institutionalizing the informal
alliance system established through its bilateral treaties with the East
European countries, concluded before the 1949 formation of NATO. As a formal
organization, the Warsaw Pact provided the Soviet Union an official counterweight
to NATO in East-West diplomacy. The Warsaw Pact gave the Soviet Union an
equal status with the United States as the leader of an alliance of ostensibly
independent nations supporting its foreign policy initiatives in the international
arena. The multilateral Warsaw Pact was an improvement over strictly bilateral
ties as a mechanism for transmitting Soviet defense and foreign policy directives
to the East European allies. The Warsaw Pact also helped to legitimize the
presence of Soviet troop--and overwhelming Soviet influence--in Eastern
Europe.

The 1955 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance between
the Soviet Union and its East European allies, which established the Warsaw
Pact, stated that relations among the signatories were based on total equality,
mutual noninterference in internal affairs, and respect for national sovereignty
and independence. It declared that the Warsaw Pact's function was collective
self-defense of the member states against external aggression, as provided
for in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The terms of the alliance
specified the Political Consultative Committee (PCC) as the highest alliance
organ. The founding document formed the Joint Command to organize the actual
defense of the Warsaw Pact member states, declared that the national deputy
ministers of defense would act as the deputies of the Warsaw Pact commander
in chief, and established the Joint Staff, which included the representatives
of the general (main) staffs of all its member states. The treaty set the
Warsaw Pact's duration at twenty years with an automatic ten- year extension,
provided that none of the member states renounced it before its expiration.
The treaty also included a standing offer to disband simultaneously with
other military alliances, i.e., NATO, contingent on East-West agreement
about a general treaty on collective security in Europe. This provision
indicated that the Soviet Union either did not expect that such an accord
could be negotiated or did not consider its new multilateral alliance structure
very important.

Early Organizational Structure and Activities

Until the early 1960s, the Soviet Union used the Warsaw Pact more as
a tool in East-West diplomacy than as a functioning political-military alliance.
Under the leadership of General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet
Union sought to project a more flexible and less threatening image abroad
and, toward this end, used the alliance's PCC to publicize its foreign policy
initiatives and peace offensives, including frequent calls for the formation
of an all-European collective security system to replace the continent's
existing military alliances. The main result of Western acceptance of these
disingenuous Soviet proposals would have been the removal of American troops
from Europe, the weakening of ties among the Western states, and increasingly
effective Soviet pressure on Western Europe. The Soviet Union also used
the PCC to propose a nonaggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Pact
and the establishment of a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe.

In the first few years after 1955, little of the Warsaw Pact's activity
was directed at building a multilateral military alliance. The Soviet Union
concentrated primarily on making the Warsaw Pact a reliable instrument for
controlling the East European allies. In fact, the putatively supranational
military agencies of the Warsaw Pact were completely subordinate to a national
agency of the Soviet Union. The Soviet General Staff in Moscow housed the
alliance's Joint Command and Joint Staff and, through these organs, controlled
the entire military apparatus of the Warsaw Pact as well as the allied armies.
Although the highest ranking officers of the alliance were supposed to be
selected through the mutual agreement of its member states, the Soviets
unilaterally appointed a first deputy Soviet minister of defense and first
deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff to serve as Warsaw Pact commander
in chief and chief of staff, respectively. While these two Soviet officers
ranked below the Soviet minister of defense, they still outranked the ministers
of defense in the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) countries. The Soviet General
Staff also posted senior colonel generals as resident representatives of
the Warsaw Pact commander in chief in all East European capitals. Serving
with the "agreement of their host countries," these successors
to the wartime and postwar Soviet advisers for the allied armies equaled
the East European ministers of defense in rank and provided a point of contact
for the commander in chief, Joint Command, and Soviet General Staff inside
the national military establishments. They directed and monitored the military
training and political indoctrination programs of the national armies to
synchronize their development with the Soviet Army. The strict Soviet control
of the Warsaw Pact's high military command positions, established at this
early stage, clearly indicated the subordination of the East European allies
to the Soviet Union.

In 1956 the Warsaw Pact member states admitted East Germany to the Joint
Command and sanctioned the transformation of its Garrisoned People's Police
into a full-fledged army. But the Soviet Union took no steps to integrate
the allied armies into a multinational force. The Soviet Union organized
only one joint Warsaw Pact military exercise and made no attempt to make
the alliance functional before 1961 except through the incorporation of
East European territory into the Soviet national air defense structure.

De-Stalinization and National Communism

In his 1956 secret speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, General Secretary Khrushchev denounced the arbitrariness,
excesses, and terror of the Joseph Stalin era. Khrushchev sought to achieve
greater legitimacy for communist party rule on the basis of the party's
ability to meet the material needs of the Soviet population. His de-Stalinization
campaign quickly influenced developments in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev accepted
the replacement of Stalinist Polish and Hungarian leaders with newly rehabilitated
communist party figures, who were able to generate genuine popular support
for their regimes by molding the socialist system to the specific historical,
political, and economic conditions in their countries. Pursuing his more
sophisticated approach in international affairs, Khrushchev sought to turn
Soviet- controlled East European satellites into at least semisovereign
countries and to make Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact less obvious.
The Warsaw Pact's formal structure served Khrushchev's purpose well, providing
a facade of genuine consultation and of joint defense and foreign-policy
decision making by the Soviet Union and the East European countries.

De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union made a superficial renationalization
of the East European military establishments possible. The Soviet Union
allowed the East European armies to restore their distinctive national practices
and to re-emphasize professional military opinions over political considerations
in most areas. Military training supplanted political indoctrination as
the primary task of the East European military establishments. Most important,
the Soviet Ministry of Defense recalled many Soviet Army officers and advisers
from their positions within the East European armies. Although the Soviet
Union still remained in control of its alliance system, these changes in
the Warsaw Pact and the NSWP armies removed some of the most objectionable
features of Sovietization.

In October 1956, the Polish and Hungarian communist parties lost control
of the de-Stalinization process in their countries. The ensuing crises threatened
the integrity of the entire Soviet alliance system in Eastern Europe. Although
Khrushchev reacted quickly to rein in the East European allies and thwart
this challenge to Soviet interests, his response in these two cases led
to a significant change in the role of the Warsaw Pact as an element of
Soviet security.

The "Polish October"

The October 1956, workers' riots in Poland defined the boundaries of
national communism acceptable to the Soviet Union. The Polish United Workers
Party found that the grievances that inspired the riots could be ameliorated
without presenting a challenge to its monopoly on political power or its
strict adherence to Soviet foreign policy and security interests. At first,
when the Polish Army and police forces refused to suppress rioting workers,
the Soviet Union prepared its forces in East Germany and Poland for an intervention
to restore order in the country. However, Poland's new communist party leader,
Wladyslaw Gomulka, and the Polish Army's top commanders indicated to Khrushchev
and the other Soviet leaders that any Soviet intervention in the internal
affairs of Poland would meet united, massive resistance. While insisting
on Poland's right to exercise greater autonomy in domestic matters, Gomulka
also pointed out that the Polish United Workers Party remained in firm control
of the country and expressed his intention to continue to accept Soviet
direction in external affairs. Gomulka even denounced the simultaneous revolution
in Hungary and Hungary's attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact, which nearly
ruptured the Soviet alliance system in Eastern Europe. Gomulka's position
protected the Soviet Union's most vital interests and enabled Poland to
reach a compromise with the Soviet leadership to defuse the crisis. Faced
with Polish resistance to a possible invasion, the Soviet Union established
its minimum requirements for the East European allies: upholding the leading
role of the communist party in society and remaining a member of the Warsaw
Pact. These two conditions ensured that Eastern Europe would remain a buffer
zone for the Soviet Union.

The Hungarian Revolution

By contrast, the full-scale revolution in Hungary, which began in late
October with public demonstrations in support of the rioting Polish workers,
openly flouted these Soviet stipulations. An initial domestic liberalization
acceptable to the Soviet Union quickly focused on nonnegotiable issues like
the communist party's exclusive hold on political power and genuine national
independence. With overwhelming support from the Hungarian public, the new
communist party leader, Imre Nagy, instituted multiparty elections. More
important, Nagy withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and ended Hungary's
alliance with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Army invaded with 200,000 troops,
crushed the Hungarian Revolution, and brought Hungary back within limits
tolerable to the Soviet Union. The five days of pitched battles left 25,000
Hungarians dead.

After 1956 the Soviet Union practically disbanded the Hungarian Army
and reinstituted a program of political indoctrination in the units that
remained. In May 1957, unable to rely on Hungarian forces to maintain order,
the Soviet Union increased its troop level in Hungary from two to four divisions
and forced Hungary to sign a status-of-forces agreement, placing the Soviet
military presence on a solid and permanent legal basis. The Soviet Army
forces stationed in Hungary officially became the Southern Group of Forces
(SGF).

The events of 1956 in Poland and Hungary forced a Soviet re- evaluation
of the reliability and roles of the NSWP countries in its alliance system.
Before 1956 the Soviet leadership believed that the Stalinist policy of
heavy political indoctrination and enforced Sovietization had transformed
the national armies into reliable instruments of the Soviet Union. However,
the East European armies were still likely to remain loyal to national causes.
Only one Hungarian Army unit fought beside the Soviet troops that put down
the 1956 revolution. In both the Polish and the Hungarian military establishments,
a basic loyalty to the national communist party regime was mixed with a
strong desire for greater national sovereignty. With East Germany still
a recent enemy and Poland and Hungary now suspect allies, the Soviet Union
turned to Czechoslovakia as its most reliable junior partner in the late
1950s and early 1960s. Czechoslovakia became the Soviet Union's first proxy
in the Third World when its military pilots trained Egyptian personnel to
fly Soviet-built MiG fighter aircraft. The Soviet Union thereby established
a pattern of shifting the weight of its reliance from one East European
country to another in response to various crises.

The Post 1956 Period

After the very foundation of the Soviet alliance system in Eastern Europe
was shaken in 1956, Khrushchev sought to shore up the Soviet Union's position.
Several developments made the task even more difficult. Between 1956 and
1962, the growing Soviet- Chinese dispute threatened to break up the Warsaw
Pact. In 1962 Albania severed relations with the Soviet Union and terminated
Soviet rights to the use of a valuable Mediterranean naval base on its Adriatic
Sea coast. That same year, Albania ended its active participation in the
Warsaw Pact and sided with the Chinese against the Soviets. Following the
example of Yugoslavia in the late 1940s, Albania was able to resist Soviet
pressures. Lacking a common border with Albania and having neither occupation
troops nor overwhelming influence in that country, the Soviet Union was
unable to use either persuasion or force to bring Albania back into the
Warsaw Pact. Khrushchev used Warsaw Pact meetings to mobilize the political
support of the Soviet Union's East European allies against China and Albania,
as well as to reinforce its control of Eastern Europe and its claim to leadership
of the communist world. More important, however, after Albania joined Yugoslavia
and Hungary on the list of defections and near-defections from the Soviet
alliance system in Eastern Europe, the Soviets began to turn the Warsaw
Pact into a tool for militarily preventing defections in the future.

The Internal Function of the Warsaw Pact

Although Khrushchev invoked the terms of the Warsaw Pact as a justification
for the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the action was in no sense a cooperative
allied effort. In the early 1960s, however, the Soviets took steps to turn
the alliance's Joint Armed Forces (JAF) into a multinational invasion force.
In the future, an appeal to the Warsaw Pact's collective self-defense provisions
and the participation of allied forces would put a multilateral cover over
unilateral Soviet interventions to keep errant member states in the alliance
and their communist parties in power. The Soviet Union sought to legitimize
its future policing actions by presenting them as the product of joint Warsaw
Pact decisions. In this way, the Soviets hoped to deflect the kind of direct
international criticism they were subjected to after the invasion of Hungary.
However, such internal deployments were clearly contrary to the Warsaw Pact's
rule of mutual noninterference in domestic affairs and conflicted with the
alliance's declared purpose of collective self-defense against external
aggression. To circumvent this semantic difficulty, the Soviets merely redefined
external aggression to include any spontaneous anti-Soviet, anticommunist
uprising in an allied state. Discarding domestic grievances as a possible
cause, the Soviet Union declared that such outbreaks were a result of imperialist
provocations and thereby constituted external aggression.

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union began to prepare the Warsaw Pact for its
internal function of keeping the NSWP member states within the alliance.
The Soviet Union took a series of steps to transform the Warsaw Pact into
its intra-alliance intervention force. Although it had previously worked
with the East European military establishments on a bilateral basis, the
Soviet Union started to integrate the national armies under the Warsaw Pact
framework. Marshal of the Soviet Union Andrei Grechko, who became commander
in chief of the alliance in 1960, was uniquely qualified to serve in his
post. During World War II, he commanded a Soviet Army group that included
significant Polish and Czechoslovak units. Beginning in 1961, Grechko made
joint military exercises between Soviet forces and the allied national armies
the primary focus of Warsaw Pact military activities.

The Soviet Union arranged these joint exercises to prevent any NSWP member
state from fully controlling its national army and to reduce the possibility
that an East European regime could successfully resist Soviet domination
and pursue independent policies. The Soviet-organized series of joint Warsaw
Pact exercises was intended to prevent other East European national command
authorities from following the example of Yugoslavia and Albania and adopting
a territorial defense strategy. Developed in the Yugoslav and Albanian partisan
struggles of World War II, territorial defense entailed a mobilization of
the entire population for a prolonged guerrilla war against an intervening
power. Under this strategy, the national communist party leadership would
maintain its integrity to direct the resistance, seek international support
for the country's defense, and keep an invader from replacing it with a
more compliant regime. Territorial defense deterred invasions by threatening
considerable opposition and enabled Yugoslavia and Albania to assert their
independence from the Soviet Union. By training and integrating the remaining
allied armies in joint exercises for operations only within a multinational
force, however, the Soviet Union reduced the ability of the other East European
countries to conduct military actions independent of Soviet control or to
hinder a Soviet invasion, as Poland and Hungary had done in October 1956.

Large-scale multilateral exercises provided opportunities for Soviet
officers to command troops of different nationalities and trained East European
national units to take orders from the Warsaw Pact or Soviet command structure.
Including Soviet troops stationed in the NSWP countries and the western
military districts of the Soviet Union, joint maneuvers drilled Soviet Army
forces for rapid, massive invasions of allied countries with the symbolic
participation of NSWP units. Besides turning the allied armies into a multinational
invasion force for controlling Eastern Europe, joint exercises also gave
the Warsaw Pact armies greater capabilities for a coalition war against
NATO. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union modernized the NSWP armies with
T- 54 and T-55 tanks, self-propelled artillery, short-range ballistic missiles
(SRBMs) equipped with conventional warheads, and MiG-21 and Su-7 ground
attack fighter aircraft. The Soviet Union completed the mechanization of
East European infantry divisions, and these new motorized rifle divisions
trained with the Soviet Army for combined arms combat in a nuclear environment.
These changes greatly increased the military value and effectiveness of
the NSWP forces. In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union gave the East European
armies their first real supporting role in its European theater operations.

Romania and the Warsaw Pact

Ironically, at the very time that the Soviet Union gave the Warsaw Pact
more substance and modernized its force structure, resentment of Soviet
political, organizational, and military domination of the Warsaw Pact and
the NSWP armies increased. There was considerable East European dissatisfaction
with a Warsaw Pact hierarchy that placed a subordinate of the Soviet minister
of defense over the East European defense ministers. The Soviets considered
the national ministers of defense, with the rank of colonel general, equivalent
only to Soviet military district commanders. The strongest objections to
the subordinate status of the NSWP countries inside the Warsaw Pact came
from the Communist Party of Romanian (Partial Communist Roman) and military
leadership under Nicolae Ceausescu.

The first indications of an independent Romanian course appeared while
the Soviet Union was shoring up its hold on Eastern Europe through formal
status-of-forces agreements with its allies. In 1958 Romania moved in the
opposite direction by demanding the withdrawal from its territory of all
Soviet troops, advisers, and the Soviet resident representative. To cover
Soviet embarrassment, Khrushchev called this a unilateral troop reduction
contributing to greater European security. Reducing its participation in
Warsaw Pact activities considerably, Romania also refused to allow Soviet
or NSWP forces, which could serve as Warsaw Pact intervention forces, to
cross or conduct exercises on its territory.

In the 1960s Romania demanded basic changes in the Warsaw Pact structure
to give the East European member states a greater role in alliance decision
making. At several PCC meetings, Romania proposed that the leading Warsaw
Pact command positions, including its commander in chief, rotate among the
top military leaders of each country. In response, the Soviet Union tried
again to mollify its allies and deemphasize its control of the alliance
by moving the Warsaw Pact military organization out of the Soviet General
Staff and making it a distinct entity, albeit still within the Soviet Ministry
of Defense. The Soviet Union also placed some joint exercises held on NSWP
territory under the nominal command of the host country's minister of defense.
However, Soviet Army commanders still conducted almost two-thirds of all
Warsaw Pact maneuvers, and these concessions proved too little and too late.

With the aim of ending Soviet domination and guarding against Soviet
encroachments, Romania reasserted full national control over its armed forces
and military policies in 1963 when, following the lead of Yugoslavia and
Albania, it adopted a territorial defense strategy called "War of the
Entire People." This nation-in-arms strategy entailed compulsory participation
in civilian defense organizations, militias, and reserve and paramilitary
forces, as well as rapid mobilization. The goal of Romania's strategy was
to make any Soviet intervention prohibitively protracted and costly. Romania
rejected any integration of Warsaw Pact forces that could undercut its ability
to resist a Soviet invasion. For example, it ended its participation in
Warsaw Pact joint exercises because multinational maneuvers required the
Romanian Army to assign its forces to a non-Romanian command authority.
Romania stopped sending its army officers to Soviet military schools for
higher education. When the Romanian military establishment and its educational
institutions assumed these functions, training focused strictly on Romania's
independent military strategy. Romania also terminated its regular exchange
of intelligence with the Soviet Union and directed counterintelligence efforts
against possible Soviet penetration of the Romanian Army. These steps combined
to make it a truly national military establishment responsive only to domestic
political authorities and ensured that it would defend the country's sovereignty.

Romania's independent national defense policy helped to underwrite its
assertion of greater policy autonomy. In the only Warsaw Pact body in which
it continued to participate actively, the PCC, Romania found a forum to
make its disagreements with the Soviet Union public, to frustrate Soviet
plans, and to work to protect its new autonomy. The Soviet Union could not
maintain the illusion of Warsaw Pact harmony when Romanian recalcitrance
forced the PCC to adopt "coordinated" rather than unanimous decisions.
Romania even held up PCC approval for several weeks of the appointment of
Marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Iakubovskii as Warsaw Pact commander in
chief. However, Romania did not enjoy the relative geographical isolation
from the Soviet Union that made Yugoslav and Albanian independence possible,
and the Soviet Union would not tolerate another outright withdrawal from
the Warsaw Pact.

The Prague Spring

In 1968 an acute crisis in the Soviet alliance system suddenly overwhelmed
the slowly festering problem of Romania. The Prague Spring represented a
more serious challenge than that posed by Romania because it occurred in
an area more crucial to Soviet security. The domestic liberalization program
of the Czechoslovak communist regime led by Alexander Dubcek threatened
to generate popular demands for similar changes in the other East European
countries and even parts of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union believed
it necessary to forestall the spread of liberalization and to assert its
right to enforce the boundaries of ideological permissibility in Eastern
Europe. However, domestic change in Czechoslovakia also began to affect
defense and foreign policy, just as it had in Hungary in 1956, despite Dubcek's
declared intention to keep Czechoslovakia within the Warsaw Pact. This worrying
development was an important factor in the Soviet decision to invade Czechoslovakia
in 1968--one that Western analysts have generally overlooked.

The new political climate of the Prague Spring and the lifting of press
censorship brought into the open a longstanding debate within the Czechoslovak
military establishment over the nature of the Warsaw Pact and Czechoslovakia's
membership in it. In the mid-1960s, this debate centered on Soviet domination
of the NSWP countries and of the Warsaw Pact and its command structure.
Czechoslovakia had supported Romania in its opposition to Soviet calls for
greater military integration and backed its demands for a genuine East European
role in alliance decision making at PCC meetings.

In 1968 high-ranking Czechoslovak officers and staff members at the Klement
Gottwald Military Academy began to discuss the need for a truly independent
national defense strategy based on Czechoslovakia's national interests rather
than the Soviet security interests that always prevailed in the Warsaw Pact.
The fundamental premise of such an independent military policy was that
an all-European collective security system, mutual nonaggression agreements
among European states, the withdrawal of all troops from foreign countries,
and a Central European nuclear-free zone could guarantee the country's security
against outside aggression better than its membership in the Warsaw Pact.
Although the Soviet Union had advocated these same arrangements in the 1950s,
Czechoslovakia was clearly out of step with the Soviet line in 1968. Czechoslovakia
threatened to complicate Soviet military strategy in Central Europe by becoming
a neutral country dividing the Warsaw Pact into two parts along its front
with NATO.

The concepts underpinning this developing Czechoslovak national defense
strategy were formalized in the Gottwald Academy Memorandum circulated to
the general (main) staffs of the other Warsaw Pact armies. The Gottwald
Memorandum received a favorable response from Poland, Hungary, and Romania.
In a televised news conference, at the height of the 1968 crisis, the chief
of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia's military department, Lieutenant
General Vaclav Prchlik, denounced the Warsaw Pact as an unequal alliance
and declared that the Czechoslovak Army was prepared to defend the country's
sovereignty by force, if necessary. In the end, the Soviet Union intervened
to prevent the Czechoslovak Army from fully developing the military capabilities
to implement its newly announced independent defense strategy, which could
have guaranteed national independence in the political and economic spheres.
The August 1968 invasion preempted the possibility of the Czechoslovak Army's
mounting a credible deterrent against future Soviet interventions. The Soviet
decision in favor of intervention focused, in large measure, on ensuring
its ability to maintain physical control of its wayward ally in the future.

In contrast to its rapid, bloody suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,
the Soviet Union engaged in a lengthy campaign of military coercion against
Czechoslovakia. In 1968 the Soviet Union conducted more joint Warsaw Pact
exercises than in any other year since the maneuvers began in the early
1960s. The Soviet Union used these exercises to mask preparations for, and
threaten, a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that would occur unless
Dubcek complied with Soviet demands and abandoned his political liberalization
program. Massive Warsaw Pact rear services and communications exercises
in July and August enabled the Soviet General Staff to execute its plan
for the invasion without alerting Western governments. Under the pretext
of exercises, Soviet and NSWP divisions were brought up to full strength,
reservists were called up, and civilian transportation resources were requisitioned.
The cover that these exercises provided allowed the Soviet Union to deploy
forces along Czechoslovakia's borders in Poland and East Germany and to
demonstrate to the Czechoslovak leadership its readiness to intervene.

On August 20, a force consisting of twenty-three Soviet Army divisions
invaded Czechoslovakia. Token NSWP contingents, including one Hungarian,
two East German, and two Polish divisions, along with one Bulgarian brigade,
also took part in the invasion. In the wake of its invasion, the Soviet
Union installed a more compliant communist party leadership and concluded
a status-of-forces agreement with Czechoslovakia, which established a permanent
Soviet presence in that country for the first time. Five Soviet Army divisions
remained in Czechoslovakia to protect the country from future "imperialist
threats." These troops became the Central Group of Forces (CGF) and
added to Soviet strength directly bordering NATO. The Czechoslovak Army,
having failed to oppose the Soviet intervention and defend the country's
sovereignty, suffered a tremendous loss of prestige after 1968. At Soviet
direction, reliable Czechoslovak authorities conducted a purge and political
re-education campaign in the Czechoslovak Army and cut its size. After 1968
the Soviet Union closed and reorganized the Klement Gottwald Military Academy.
With its one-time junior partner now proven unreliable, the Soviet Union
turned to Poland as its principal East European ally.

The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia showed the hollowness of the
Soviet alliance system in Eastern Europe in both its political and its military
aspects. The Soviet Union did not convene the PCC to invoke the Warsaw Pact
during the 1968 crisis because a formal PCC session would have revealed
a deep rift in the Soviet alliance and given Czechoslovakia an international
platform from which it could have defended its reform program. The Soviet
Union did not allow NSWP officers to direct the Warsaw Pact exercises that
preceded the intervention in Czechoslovakia, and Soviet Army officers commanded
all multinational exercises during the crisis. While the intervention force
was mobilized and deployed under the Warsaw Pact's commander in chief, the
Soviet General Staff transferred full operational command of the invasion
to the commander in chief of the Soviet ground forces, Army General I. G.
Pavlovskii. Despite the participation of numerous East European army units,
the invasion of Czechoslovakia was not in any sense a multilateral action.
The Soviet invasion force carried out all important operations on Czechoslovakia's
territory. Moreover, the Soviet Union quickly withdrew all NSWP troops from
Czechoslovakia to forestall the possibility of their ideological contamination.
NSWP participation served primarily to make the invasion appear to be a
multinational operation and to deflect direct international criticism of
the Soviet Union.

While the participation of four NSWP armies in the Soviet-led invasion
of Czechoslovakia demonstrated considerable Warsaw Pact cohesion, the invasion
also served to erode it. The invasion of Czechoslovakia proved that the
Warsaw Pact's internal mission of keeping orthodox East European communist
party regimes in power-- and less orthodox ones in line--was more important
than the external mission of defending its member states against external
aggression. The Soviet Union was unable to conceal the fact that the alliance
served as the ultimate mechanism for its control of Eastern Europe. Formulated
in response to the crisis in Czechoslovakia, the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine
declared that the East European countries had "limited" sovereignty
to be exercised only as long as it did not damage the interests of the "socialist
commonwealth" as a whole. Since the Soviet Union defined the interests
of the "socialist commonwealth," it could force its NSWP allies
to respect its overwhelming security interest in keeping Eastern Europe
as its buffer zone.

The Romanian leader, Ceausescu, after refusing to contribute troops to
the Soviet intervention force as the other East European countries had done,
denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia as a violation of international
law and the Warsaw Pact's cardinal principle of mutual noninterference in
internal affairs. Ceausescu insisted that collective self-defense against
external aggression was the only valid mission of the Warsaw Pact. Albania
also objected to the Soviet invasion and indicated its disapproval by withdrawing
formally from the Warsaw Pact after six years of inactive membership.

THE ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE WARSAW PACT

The Warsaw Pact administers both the political and the military activities
of the Soviet alliance system in Eastern Europe. A series of changes beginning
in 1969 gave the Warsaw Pact the structure it retained through the mid-1980s.

Political Organization

The general (first) secretaries of the communist and workers' parties
and heads of state of the Warsaw Pact member states meet in the PCC (see
table A, this Appendix). The PCC provides a formal point of contact for
the Soviet and East European leaders in addition to less formal bilateral
meetings and visits. As the highest decision-making body of the Warsaw Pact,
the PCC is charged with assessing international developments that could
affect the security of the allied states and warrant the execution of the
Warsaw Pact's collective self-defense provisions. In practice, however,
the Soviet Union has been unwilling to rely on the PCC to perform this function,
fearing that Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania could use PCC meetings
to oppose Soviet plans and policies. The PCC is also the main center for
coordinating the foreign policy activities of the Warsaw Pact countries.
Since the late 1960s, when several member states began to use the alliance
structure to confront the Soviets and assert more independent foreign policies,
the Soviet Union has had to bargain and negotiate to gain support for its
foreign policy within Warsaw Pact councils.

In 1976 the PCC established the permanent Committee of Ministers of Foreign
Affairs (CMFA) to regularize the previously ad hoc meetings of Soviet and
East European representatives to the Warsaw Pact. Given the official task
of preparing recommendations for and executing the decisions of the PCC,
the CMFA and its permanent Joint Secretariat have provided the Soviet Union
an additional point of contact to establish a consensus among its allies
on contentious issues. Less formal meetings of the deputy ministers of foreign
affairs of the Warsaw Pact member states represent another layer of alliance
coordination. If alliance problems can be resolved at these working levels,
they will not erupt into embarrassing disputes between the Soviet and East
European leaders at PCC meetings.

Military Organization

The Warsaw Pact's military organization is larger and more active than
the alliance's political bodies. Several different organizations are responsible
for implementing PCC directives on defense matters and developing the capabilities
of the national armies that constitute the JAF. However, the principal task
of the military organizations is to link the East European armies to the
Soviet armed forces. The alliance's military agencies coordinate the training
and mobilization of East European national forces assigned to the Warsaw
Pact. In turn, these forces can be deployed in accordance with Soviet military
strategy against an NSWP country or NATO.

Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact as a military alliance is scarcely
veiled. The Warsaw Pact's JAF has no command structure, logistics network,
air defense system, or operations directorate separate from the Soviet Ministry
of Defense. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia demonstrated how easily
control of the JAF could be transferred in wartime to the Soviet General
Staff and Soviet field commanders. The dual roles of the Warsaw Pact commander
in chief, who is a first deputy Soviet minister of defense, and the Warsaw
Pact chief of staff, who is a first deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff,
facilitate the transfer of Warsaw Pact forces to Soviet control. The subordination
of the Warsaw Pact to the Soviet General Staff is also shown clearly in
the Soviet military hierarchy. The chief of the Soviet General Staff is
listed above the Warsaw Pact commander in chief in the Soviet order of precedence,
even though both positions are filled by first deputy Soviet ministers of
defense.

Ironically, the first innovations in the Warsaw Pact's structure since
1955 came after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had clearly underlined
Soviet control of the alliance. At the 1969 PCC session in Budapest, the
Soviet Union agreed to cosmetic alterations in the Warsaw Pact designed
to address East European complaints about Soviet domination of the alliance.
These changes included the establishment of the formal Committee of Ministers
of Defense (CMD) and the Military Council as well as the addition of more
non-Soviet officers to the Joint Command and the Joint Staff (see fig. B,
this Appendix).

The CMD is the leading military body of the Warsaw Pact. In addition
to the ministers of defense of the Warsaw Pact member states, the commander
in chief and the chief of staff of the JAF are statutory members of the
CMD. With its three seats on the CMD, the Soviet Union can exercise a working
majority in the nine-member body with the votes of only two of its more
loyal East European allies. The chairmanship of the CMD supposedly rotates
among the ministers of defense. In any event, the brief annual meetings
of the CMD severely limit its work to pro forma pronouncements or narrow
guidelines for the Joint Command, Military Council, and Joint Staff to follow.

The Joint Command develops the overall training plan for joint Warsaw
Pact exercises and for the national armies to promote the assimilation of
Soviet equipment and tactics. Headed by the Warsaw Pact's commander in chief,
the Joint Command is divided into distinct Soviet and East European tiers.
The deputy commanders in chief include Soviet and East European officers.
The Soviet officers serving as deputy commanders in chief are specifically
responsible for coordinating the East European navies and air forces with
the corresponding Soviet service branches. The East European deputy commanders
in chief are the deputy ministers of defense of the NSWP countries. While
providing formal NSWP representation in the Joint Command, the East European
deputies also assist in the coordination of Soviet and non-Soviet forces.
The commander in chief, deputy commanders in chief, and chief of staff of
the JAF gather in the Military Council on a semiannual basis to plan and
evaluate operational and combat training. With the Warsaw Pact's commander
in chief acting as chairman, the sessions of the Military Council rotate
among the capitals of the Warsaw Pact countries.

The Joint Staff is the only standing Warsaw Pact military body and the
official executive organ of the CMD, commander in chief, and Military Council.
As such, it performs the bulk of the Warsaw Pact's work in the military
realm. Like the Joint Command, the Joint Staff has both Soviet and East
European officers. These non-Soviet officers also serve as the principal
link between the Soviet and East European armed forces. The Joint Staff
organizes all joint exercises and arranges multilateral meetings and contacts
of Warsaw Pact military personnel at all levels.

The PCC's establishment of official CMD meetings, the Military Council,
and the bifurcation of the Joint Command and Joint Staff allowed for greater
formal East European representation, as well as more working-level positions
for senior non-Soviet officers, in the alliance. Increased NSWP input into
the alliance decision-making process ameliorated East European dissatisfaction
with continued Soviet dominance of the Warsaw Pact and even facilitated
the work of the JAF. However, a larger NSWP role in the alliance did not
reduce actual Soviet control of the Warsaw Pact command structure.

The 1969 PCC meeting also approved the formation of two more Warsaw Pact
military bodies, the Military Scientific-Technical Council and the Technical
Committee. These innovations in the Warsaw Pact structure represented a
Soviet attempt to harness NSWP weapons and military equipment production,
which had greatly increased during the 1960s. The Military Scientific-Technical
Council assumed responsibility for directing armaments research and development
within the Warsaw Pact, while the Technical Committee coordinated standardization.
Comecon's Military- Industrial Commission supervised NSWP military production
facilities (see Appendix B).

After 1969 the Soviet Union insisted on tighter Warsaw Pact military
integration as the price for greater NSWP participation in alliance decision
making. Under the pretext of directing Warsaw Pact programs and activities
aimed at integration, officers from the Soviet Ministry of Defense penetrated
the East European armed forces. Meetings between senior officers from the
Soviet and East European main political administrations allowed the Soviets
to monitor the loyalty of the national military establishments. Joint Warsaw
Pact exercises afforded ample opportunity for the evaluation and selection
of reliable East European officers for promotion to command positions in
the field, the national military hierarchies, and the Joint Staff. Warsaw
Pact military science conferences, including representatives from each NSWP
general (main) staff, enabled the Soviets to check for signs that an East
European ally was formulating a national strategy or developing military
capabilities beyond Soviet control. In 1973 the deputy ministers of foreign
affairs signed the "Convention on the Capacities, Privileges, and Immunities
of the Staff and Other Administrative Organs of the Joint Armed Forces of
the Warsaw Pact Member States," which established the principle of
extraterritoriality for alliance agencies, legally sanctioned the efforts
of these Soviet officers to penetrate the East European military establishments,
and prevented any host government interference in their work. Moreover,
the Warsaw Pact commander in chief still retained his resident representatives
in the national ministries of defense as direct sources of information on
the situation inside the allied armies.

THE WARSAW PACT, 1970-87

The crisis in Czechoslovakia and Romania's recalcitrance gave a new dimension
to the challenge facing the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union's
East European allies had learned that withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and
achieving independence from Soviet control were unrealistic goals, and they
aimed instead at establishing a greater measure of autonomy within the alliance.
Romania had successfully carved out a more independent position within the
bounds of the Warsaw Pact. In doing so, it provided an example to the other
East European countries of how to use the Warsaw Pact councils and committees
to articulate positions contrary to Soviet interests. Beginning in the early
1970s, the East European allies formed intra- alliance coalitions in Warsaw
Pact meetings to oppose the Soviet Union, defuse its pressure on any one
NSWP member state, and delay or obstruct Soviet policies. The Soviets could
no longer use the alliance to transmit their positions to, and receive an
automatic endorsement from, the subordinate NSWP countries. While still
far from genuine consultation, Warsaw Pact policy coordination between the
Soviet Union and the East European countries in the 1970s was a step away
from the blatant Soviet control of the alliance that had characterized the
1950s. East European opposition forced the Soviet Union to treat the Warsaw
Pact as a forum for managing relations with its allies and bidding for their
support on issues like dÈtente, the Third World, the Solidarity crisis
in Poland, alliance burden-sharing, and relations with NATO.

DÈtente

In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union abandoned its earlier efforts to
achieve the simultaneous dissolution of the two European military blocs
and concentrated instead on legitimizing the territorial status quo in Europe.
The Soviets asserted that the official East-West agreements reached during
the dÈtente era "legally secured the most important political-territorial
results of World War II." Under these arrangements, the Soviet Union
allowed its East European allies to recognize West Germany's existence as
a separate state. In return the West, and West Germany in particular, explicitly
accepted the inviolability of all postwar borders in Eastern Europe and
tacitly recognized Soviet control of the eastern half of both Germany and
Europe. The Soviets claim the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation
in Europe (CSCE), which ratified the existing political division of Europe,
as a major victory for Soviet diplomacy and the realization of longstanding
Soviet calls, issued through the PCC, for a general European conference
on collective security.

The consequences of dÈtente, however, also posed a significant
challenge to Soviet control of Eastern Europe. First, dÈtente caused
a crisis in Soviet-East German relations. East Germany's leader, Walter
Ulbricht, opposed improved relations with West Germany and, following Ceausescu's
tactics, used Warsaw Pact councils to attack the Soviet dÈtente policy
openly. In the end, the Soviet Union removed Ulbricht from power, in 1971,
and proceeded unhindered into dÈtente with the West. Second, dÈtente
blurred the strict bipolarity of the cold war era, opened Eastern Europe
to greater Western influence, and loosened Soviet control over its allies.
The relaxation of East-West tensions in the 1970s reduced the level of threat
perceived by the NSWP countries, along with their perceived need for Soviet
protection, and eroded Warsaw Pact alliance cohesion. After the West formally
accepted the territorial status quo in Europe, the Soviet Union was unable
to point to the danger of "imperialist" attempts to overturn East
European communist party regimes to justify its demand for strict Warsaw
Pact unity behind its leadership, as it had in earlier years. The Soviets
resorted to occasional propaganda offensives, accusing West Germany of revanchism
and aggressive intentions in Eastern Europe, to remind its allies of their
ultimate dependence on Soviet protection and to reinforce the Warsaw Pact's
cohesion against the attraction of good relations with the West.

Despite these problems, the dÈtente period witnessed relatively
stable Soviet-East European relations within the Warsaw Pact. In the early
1970s, the Soviet Union greatly expanded military cooperation with the NSWP
countries. The joint Warsaw Pact exercises, conducted in the 1970s, gave
the Soviet allies their first real capability for offensive operations other
than intra-bloc policing actions. The East European countries also began
to take an active part in Soviet strategy in the Third World.

The Role of the Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Countries in the Third World

With Eastern Europe in a relatively quiescent phase, the Soviet Union
began to build an informal alliance system in the Third World during the
1970s. In this undertaking the Soviets drew on their experiences in developing
allies in Eastern Europe after 1945. Reflecting this continuity, the Soviet
Union called its new Third World allies "people's democracies"
and their armed forces "national liberation armies." The Soviets
also drew on their East European resources directly by enlisting the Warsaw
Pact allies as proxies to "enhance the role of socialism in world affairs,"
that is, to support Soviet interests in the Middle East and Africa. Since
the late 1970s, the NSWP countries have been active mainly in Soviet-allied
Angola, Congo, Ethiopia, Libya, Mozambique, the People's Democratic Republic
of Yemen (South Yemen), and Syria.

The Soviet Union employed its Warsaw Pact allies as surrogates primarily
because their activities would minimize the need for direct Soviet involvement
and obviate possible international criticism of Soviet actions in the Third
World. Avowedly independent East European actions would be unlikely to precipitate
or justify a response by the United States. The Soviet Union also counted
on closer East European economic ties with Third World countries to alleviate
some of Eastern Europe's financial problems. From the East European perspective,
involvement in the Third World offered an opportunity for reduced reliance
on the Soviet Union and for semiautonomous relations with other countries.

In the 1970s, the East European allies followed the lead of Soviet diplomacy
and signed treaties of friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance with
most of the important Soviet Third World allies. These treaties established
a "socialist division of labor" among the East European countries,
in which each specialized in the provision of certain aspects of military
or economic assistance to different Soviet Third World allies. The most
important part of the treaties concerned military cooperation; the Soviets
have openly acknowledged the important role of the East European allies
in providing weapons to the "national armies of countries with socialist
orientation."

In the 1970s and 1980s, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany were
the principal Soviet proxies for arms transfers to the Third World. These
NSWP countries supplied Soviet- manufactured equipment, spare parts, and
training personnel to various Third World armies. The Soviet Union used
these countries to transship weapons to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
(North Vietnam) in the early 1970s, Soviet-backed forces in the 1975 Angolan
civil war, and Nicaragua in the 1980s. The Soviet Union also relied on East
German advisers to set up armed militias, paramilitary police forces, and
internal security and intelligence organizations for selected Third World
allies. The Soviets considered this task especially important because an
efficient security apparatus would be essential for suppressing opposition
forces and keeping a ruling regime, allied to the Soviet Union, in power.
In addition to on-site activities, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and particularly
East Germany trained Third World military and security personnel in Eastern
Europe during the 1980s. During this period, the Soviet Union also relied
on its East European allies to provide the bulk of Soviet bloc economic
aid and credits to the countries of the Third World. Perhaps revealing their
hesitancy about military activities outside the Warsaw Pact's European operational
area, Hungary and Poland have confined their Third World involvement to
commercial assistance. Both countries sent economic and administrative advisers
to assist in the management of state- directed industrial enterprises in
the Third World as part of a Soviet campaign to demonstrate the advantages
of the "socialist path of development" to potential Third World
allies.

The Warsaw Pact has added no new member states in the more than thirty
years of its existence. Even at the height of its Third World activities
in the mid- to late 1970s, the Soviet Union did not offer Warsaw Pact membership
to any of its important Third World allies. In 1986, after the United States
bombed Libya in retaliation for its support of international terrorism,
the Soviet Union was reported to have strongly discouraged Libyan interest
in Warsaw Pact membership, expressed through one or more NSWP countries,
and limited its support of Libya to bilateral consultations after the raid.
Having continually accused the United States of attempting to extend NATO's
sphere of activity beyond Europe, the Soviets did not want to open themselves
to charges of broadening the Warsaw Pact. In any event, the Soviet Union
would be unlikely to accept a noncommunist, non-European state into the
Warsaw Pact. Moreover, the Soviets have already had considerable success
in establishing strong allies throughout the world, outside their formal
military alliance.

Beginning in the late 1970s, mounting economic problems sharply curtailed
the contribution of the East European allies to Soviet Third World activities.
In the early 1980s, when turmoil in Poland reminded the Soviet Union that
Eastern Europe remained its most valuable asset, the Third World became
a somewhat less important object of Soviet attention.

The Solidarity Crisis

The rise of the independent trade union Solidarity shook the foundation
of communist party rule in Poland and, consequently, Soviet control of a
country the Soviet Union considers critical to its security and alliance
system. Given Poland's central geographic position, this unrest threatened
to isolate East Germany, sever vital lines of communication to Soviet forces
deployed against NATO, and disrupt Soviet control in the rest of Eastern
Europe.

As in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet Union used the Warsaw Pact to
carry out a campaign of military coercion against the Polish leadership.
In 1980 and 1981, the Soviet Union conducted joint Warsaw Pact exercises
with a higher frequency than at any time since 1968 to exert pressure on
the Polish regime to solve the Solidarity problem. Under the cover that
the exercises afforded, the Soviet Union mobilized and deployed its reserve
and regular troops in the Byelorussian Military District as a potential
invasion force. In the West-81 and Union-81 exercises, Soviet forces practiced
amphibious and airborne assault landings on the Baltic Sea coast of Poland.
These maneuvers demonstrated a ready Soviet capability for intervention
in Poland.

In the midst of the Polish crisis, Warsaw Pact commander in chief Viktor
Kulikov played a crucial role in intra-alliance diplomacy on behalf of the
Soviet leadership. Kulikov maintained almost constant contact with the Polish
leadership and conferred with the leaders of Bulgaria, East Germany, and
Romania about a possible multilateral Warsaw Pact military action against
Poland. In December 1981, Kulikov pressed Polish United Workers Party first
secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski to activate his contingency plan for declaring
martial law with the warning that the Soviet Union was ready to intervene
in the absence of quick action by Polish authorities. As it turned out,
the Polish government instituted martial law and suppressed Solidarity just
as the Soviet press was reporting that these steps were necessary to ensure
that Poland could meet its Warsaw Pact commitment to the security of the
other member states.

From the Soviet perspective, the imposition of martial law by Polish
internal security forces was the best possible outcome. Martial law made
the suppression of Solidarity a strictly domestic affair and spared the
Soviet Union the international criticism that an invasion would have generated.
However, the use of the extensive Polish paramilitary police and riot troops
suggested that the Soviet Union could not count on the Polish Army to put
down Polish workers. Moreover, while the Brezhnev Doctrine of using force
to maintain the leading role of the communist party in society was upheld
in Poland, it was not the Soviet Union that enforced it.

Some question remains as to whether the Soviet Union could have used
force successfully against Poland. An invasion would have damaged the Soviet
Union's beneficial dÈtente relationship with Western Europe. Intervention
would also have added to the evidence that the internal police function
of the Warsaw Pact was more important than the putative external collective
self-defense mission it had never exercised. Moreover, Romania, and conceivably
Hungary, would have refused to contribute contingents to a multinational
Warsaw Pact force intended to camouflage a Soviet invasion. Failure to gain
the support of its allies would have represented a substantial embarrassment
to the Soviet Union. In stark contrast to the unopposed intervention in
Czechoslovakia, the Soviets probably also anticipated tenacious resistance
from the general population and the Polish Army to any move against Poland.
Finally, an invasion would have placed a weighty economic and military burden
on the Soviet Union; the occupation and administration of Poland would have
tied down at least ten Soviet Army divisions for an extended period of time.
Nevertheless, had there been no other option, the Soviet Union would certainly
have invaded Poland to eliminate Solidarity's challenge to communist party
rule in that country.

Although the Polish Army had previously played an important role in Soviet
strategy for a coalition war against NATO, the Soviet Union had to revise
its plans and estimates of Poland's reliability after 1981, and it turned
to East Germany as its most reliable ally. In the early 1980s, because of
its eager promotion of Soviet interests in the Third World and its importance
in Soviet military strategy, East Germany completed its transformation from
defeated enemy and dependent ally into the premier junior partner of the
Soviet Union. Ironically, East Germany's efficiency and loyalty have made
the Soviet Union uncomfortable. Encroaching somewhat on the leading role
of the Soviet Union in the Warsaw Pact, East Germany has been the only NSWP
country to institute the rank of marshal, matching the highest Soviet Army
rank and implying its equality with the Soviet Union.

The End of DÈtente

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the West grew disenchanted with dÈtente,
which had failed to prevent Soviet advances in the Third World, the deployment
of SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) aimed at West European
targets, the invasion of Afghanistan, or the suppression of Solidarity.
The Soviet Union used the renewal of East-West conflict as a justification
for forcing its allies to close ranks within the Warsaw Pact. But restoring
the alliance's cohesion and renewing its confrontation with Western Europe
proved difficult after several years of good East-West relations. The East
European countries had acquired a stake in maintaining dÈtente for
various reasons. In the early 1980s, internal Warsaw Pact disputes centered
on relations with the West after dÈtente, NSWP contributions to alliance
defense spending, and the alliance's reaction to IRBM deployments in NATO.
The resolution of these disputes produced significant changes in the Warsaw
Pact as, for the first time, two or more NSWP countries simultaneously challenged
Soviet military and foreign policy preferences within the alliance.

In the PCC meetings of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet and East
European leaders of the Warsaw Pact debated about the threat emanating from
NATO. When the Soviet Union argued that a new cold war loomed over Europe,
the East European countries insisted that the improved European political
climate of dÈtente still prevailed. On several occasions, the Soviets
had to compromise on the relative weight of these two alternatives in the
language of PCC declarations. Although the Soviet Union succeeded in officially
ending dÈtente for the Warsaw Pact, it was unable to achieve significantly
greater alliance cohesion or integration.

Discussions of the "NATO threat" also played a large part in
Warsaw Pact debates about an appropriate level of NSWP military expenditure.
The Soviet Union used the 1978 PCC meeting to try to force its allies to
match a scheduled 3-percent, long-term increase in the military budgets
of the NATO countries. Although the East European countries initially balked
at this Soviet demand, they eventually agreed to the increase. However,
only East Germany actually honored its pledge, and the Soviet Union failed
to achieve its goal of increased NSWP military spending.

The debate on alliance burden-sharing did not end in 1978. Beginning
in the late 1970s, the Soviets carefully noted that one of the Warsaw Pact's
most important functions was monitoring the "fraternal countries and
the fulfillment of their duties in the joint defense of socialism."
In 1983 Romania adopted a unilateral three-year freeze on its military budget
at its 1982 level. In 1985 Ceausescu frustrated the Soviet Union by calling
for a unilateral Warsaw Pact reduction in arms expenditures, ostensibly
to put pressure on NATO to follow its example. At the same time, Hungary
opposed Soviet demands for increased spending, arguing instead for more
rational use of existing resources. In the mid- 1980s, East Germany was
the only Soviet ally that continued to expand its military spending.

The refusal of the NSWP countries to meet their Warsaw Pact financial
obligations in the 1980s clearly indicated diminished alliance cohesion.
The East European leaders argued that the costs of joint exercises, their
support for Soviet Army garrisons, and the drain of conscription represented
sufficient contributions to the alliance at a time of hardship in their
domestic economies. In addition to providing access to bases and facilities
opposite NATO, the East European communist regimes were also obligated to
abide by Soviet foreign policy and security interests to earn a Soviet guarantee
against domestic challenges to their continued rule. For its part, the Soviet
Union paid a stiff price in terms of economic aid and subsidized trade with
the NSWP countries to maintain its buffer zone in Eastern Europe.

The issue of an appropriate Warsaw Pact response to NATO's 1983 deployment
of American Pershing II and cruise missiles, matching the Soviet SS-20s,
proved to be the most divisive one for the Soviet Union and its East European
allies in the early and mid-1980s. After joining in a vociferous Soviet
propaganda campaign against the deployment, the East European countries
split with the Soviet Union over how to react when their "peace offensive"
failed to forestall it.

In 1983 East Germany, Hungary, and Romania indicated their intention
to "limit the damage" to East-West ties that could have resulted
from the deployment of NATO's new missiles. In doing so, these countries
raised the possibility of an independent role for the smaller countries
of both alliances in reducing conflicts between the two superpowers. In
particular, East Germany sought to insulate its profitable economic ties
with West Germany, established through dÈtente, against the general
deterioration in East-West political relations. While East Germany had always
been the foremost proponent of "socialist internationalism," that
is, strict adherence to Soviet foreign policy interests, its position on
this issue caused a rift in the Warsaw Pact. In effect, East Germany asserted
that the national interests of the East European countries did not coincide
exactly with those of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia attacked the East German stand, accusing
the improbable intra-bloc alliance of East Germany, Hungary, and Romania
of undermining the class basis of Warsaw Pact foreign policy. The Soviet
Union indicated that it would not permit its allies to become mediators
between East and West. The Soviet Union forced East Germany to accept its
"counterdeployments" of SS-21 and SS-23 SRBMs and compelled SED
general secretary Erich Honecker to cancel his impending visit to West Germany.
The Soviets thereby reaffirmed their right to determine the conditions under
which the Warsaw Pact member states would conduct relations with the NATO
countries. However, the Soviet Union also had to forego any meeting of the
PCC in 1984 that might have allowed its recalcitrant allies to publicize
their differences on this issue.

As late as 1985, Soviet leaders still had not completely resolved the
question of the proper connection between the national and international
interests of the socialist countries. Some Soviet commentators adopted a
conciliatory approach toward the East European position by stating that
membership in the Warsaw Pact did not erase a country's specific national
interests, which could be combined harmoniously with the common international
interests of all the member states. Others, however, simply repeated the
Brezhnev Doctrine and its stricture that a socialist state's sovereignty
involves not only the right to independence but also a responsibility to
the "socialist commonwealth" as a whole.

The Problem of Romania in the 1970s and 1980s

The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was, tangentially, a warning
to Romania about its attempts to pursue genuine national independence. But
Ceausescu, in addition to refusing to contribute Romanian troops to the
Warsaw Pact invasion force, openly declared that Romania would resist any
similar Soviet intervention on its territory. Romania pronounced that henceforth
the Soviet Union represented its most likely national security threat. After
1968 the Romanian Army accelerated its efforts to make its independent defense
strategy a credible deterrent to a possible Soviet invasion of the country.
In the 1970s Romania also established stronger ties to the West, China,
and the Third World. These diplomatic, economic, and military relations
were intended to increase Romania's independence from the Warsaw Pact and
the Soviet Union, while guaranteeing broad international support for Romania
in the event of a Soviet invasion.

Throughout the 1970s, Romania continued to reject military integration
within the Warsaw Pact framework and military intervention against other
member states, while insisting on the right of the East European countries
to resolve their internal problems without Soviet interference. Romanian
objections to the Soviet line within the Warsaw Pact forced the Soviet Union
to acknowledge the "possibility of differences arising in the views
of the ruling communist parties on the assessment of some international
developments." To obtain Romanian assent on several questions, the
Soviet Union also had to substitute the milder formulation "international
solidarity" for "socialist internationalism"--the code phrase
for the subordination of East European national interests to Soviet interests--in
PCC declarations. Pursuing a policy opposed to close alliance integration,
Romania resisted Soviet domination of Warsaw Pact weapons production as
a threat to its autonomy and refused to participate in the work of the Military
Scientific-Technical Council and Technical Committee (see The Military Organization
of the Warsaw Pact, this Appendix). Nevertheless, the Soviets have insisted
that a Romanian Army officer holds a position on the Technical Committee;
his rank, however, is not appropriate to that level of responsibility. The
Soviet claims are probably intended to obscure the fact that Romania does
not actually engage in joint Warsaw Pact weapons production efforts.

Despite continued Romanian defiance of Soviet policies in the Warsaw
Pact during the 1980s, the Soviet Union successfully exploited Romania's
severe economic problems and bribed Romania with energy supplies on several
occasions to gain its assent, or at least silence, in the Warsaw Pact. Although
Romania raised the price the Soviet Union had to pay to bring it into line,
Romanian dependence on Soviet economic support may foreshadow Romania's
transformation into a more cooperative Warsaw Pact ally. Moreover, in 1985
Ceausescu dismissed Minister of Foreign Affairs Stefan Andrei and Minister
of Defense Constantin Olteanu, who helped establish the country's independent
policies and would have opposed closer Romanian involvement with the Warsaw
Pact.

The Renewal of the Alliance

In his first important task after becoming general secretary of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union in March 1985, Mikhail S. Gorbachev organized
a meeting of the East European leaders to renew the Warsaw Pact, which was
due to expire that May after thirty years. There was little doubt that the
Warsaw Pact member states would renew the alliance. However, there was some
speculation that the Soviet Union might unilaterally dismantle its formal
alliance structure to improve the Soviet image in the West and put pressure
on NATO to disband. The Soviets could still have relied on the network of
bilateral treaties in Eastern Europe, which predated the formation of the
Warsaw Pact and had been renewed regularly. Combined with later status-of-forces
agreements, these treaties ensured that the essence of the Soviet alliance
system and buffer zone in Eastern Europe would remain intact, regardless
of the Warsaw Pact's status. But despite their utility, the bilateral treaties
could never substitute for the Warsaw Pact. Without a formal alliance, the
Soviet Union would have to coordinate foreign policy and military integration
with its East European allies through cumbersome bilateral arrangements.
Without the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union would have no political equivalent
of NATO for international negotiations like the CSCE and Mutual and Balanced
Force Reduction talks, or for issuing its arms control pronouncements. The
Soviet Union would also have to give up its equal status with the United
States as an alliance leader.

Although the Soviet and East European leaders debated the terms of the
Warsaw Pact's renewal at their April 1985 meeting-- Ceausescu reportedly
proposed that it be renewed for a shorter period--they did not change the
original 1955 document, or the alliance's structure, in any way. The Soviets
concluded that this outcome proved that the Warsaw Pact truly embodied the
"fundamental long-term interests of the fraternal countries."
The decision to leave the Warsaw Pact unamended was probably the easiest
alternative for the Soviet Union and its allies; the alliance was renewed
for another twenty-year term with an automatic ten-year extension.

In the mid- to late 1980s, the future of the Warsaw Pact hinged on Gorbachev's
developing policy toward Eastern Europe. At the Twenty-seventh Congress
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1986, Gorbachev acknowledged
that differences existed among the Soviet allies and that it would be unrealistic
to expect them to have identical views on all issues. There has been no
firm indication, as yet, of whether Gorbachev would be willing to grant
the Soviet allies more policy latitude or insist on tighter coordination
with the Soviet Union. However, demonstrating a greater sensitivity to East
European concerns than previous Soviet leaders, Gorbachev briefed the NSWP
leaders in their own capitals after the 1985 Geneva and 1986 Reykjavik superpower
summit meetings.

According to many Western analysts, mounting economic difficulties in
the late 1980s and the advanced age of trusted, long-time communist party
leaders, like Gustav Husak in Czechoslovakia, Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria,
and Janos Kadar in Hungary, presented the danger of domestic turmoil and
internal power struggles in the NSWP countries. These problems had the potential
to monopolize Soviet attention and constrain Soviet global activities. But
the Soviet Union could turn these potential crises into opportunities, using
its economic leverage to pressure its East European allies to adhere more
closely to Soviet positions or to influence the political succession process
to ensure that a new generation of leaders in Eastern Europe would respect
Soviet interests. Soviet insistence on greater NSWP military spending could
fuel further economic deterioration, leading to political unrest and even
threats to the integrity of the Soviet alliance system in several countries
simultaneously. Conversely, limited, Soviet-sanctioned deviation from orthodox
socialism could make the East European regimes more secure and reduce the
Soviet burden of policing the Warsaw Pact.

SOVIET MILITARY STRATEGY AND THE WARSAW PACT

The Soviet ground forces constitute the bulk of the Warsaw Pact's military
power. In 1987 the Soviet Union provided 73 of the 126 Warsaw Pact tank
and motorized rifle divisions. Located in the Soviet Groups of Forces (SGFs)
and four westernmost military districts of the Soviet Union, these Soviet
Army divisions comprise the majority of the Warsaw Pact's combat- ready,
full-strength units. Looking at the numbers of Soviet troops stationed in
or near Eastern Europe, and the historical record, one could conclude that
the Warsaw Pact is only a Soviet mechanism for organizing intra-alliance
interventions or maintaining control of Eastern Europe and does not significantly
augment Soviet offensive power vis-¦-vis NATO. Essentially a peacetime
structure for NSWP training and mobilization, the Warsaw Pact has no independent
role in wartime nor a military strategy distinct from Soviet military strategy.
However, the individual NSWP armies play important parts in Soviet strategy
for war, outside the formal context of the Warsaw Pact.

Soviet Military Strategy

The goal of Soviet military strategy in Europe is a quick victory over
NATO in a nonnuclear war. The Soviet Union would attempt to defeat NATO
decisively before its political and military command structure could consult
and decide how to respond to an attack. Under this strategy, success would
hinge on inflicting a rapid succession of defeats on NATO to break its will
to fight, knock some of its member states out of the war, and cause the
collapse of the Western alliance. A quick victory would also keep the United
States from escalating the conflict to the nuclear level by making retaliation
against the Soviet Union futile. A rapid defeat of NATO would preempt the
mobilization of its superior industrial and economic resources, as well
as reinforcement from the United States, which would enable NATO to prevail
in a longer war. Most significant, in a strictly conventional war the Soviet
Union could conceivably capture its objective, the economic potential of
Western Europe, relatively intact.

In the 1970s, Soviet nuclear force developments increased the likelihood
that a European war would remain on the conventional level. By matching
the United States in intercontinental ballistic missiles and adding intermediate-range
SS-20s to its nuclear forces, the Soviet Union undercut NATO's option to
employ nuclear weapons to avoid defeat in a conventional war. After the
United States neutralized the Soviet SS-20 IRBM advantage by deploying Pershing
II and cruise missiles, the Soviet Union tried to use its so-called "counterdeployments"
of SS-21 and SS-23 SRBMs to gain a nuclear-war fighting edge in the European
theater. At the same time, the Soviet Union made NATO's dependence on nuclear
weapons less tenable by issuing Warsaw Pact proposals for mutual no-first-use
pledges and the establishment of nuclear-free zones.

The Soviet plan for winning a conventional war quickly to preclude the
possibility of a nuclear response by NATO and the United States was based
on the deep-strike concept Soviet military theoreticians first proposed
in the 1930s. After 1972 the Soviet Army put deep strike into practice in
annual joint Warsaw Pact exercises, including "Brotherhood-in-Arms,"
"Union," "Friendship," "West," and "Shield."
Deep strike would carry an attack behind the front lines of battle, far
into NATO's rear areas. The Soviet Union would launch simultaneous missile
and air strikes against vital NATO installations to disrupt or destroy the
Western alliance's early warning surveillance systems, command and communications
network, and nuclear delivery systems. Following this initial strike, the
modern-day successor of the World War II-era Soviet mobile group formations,
generated out of the SGFs in Eastern Europe, would break through and encircle
NATO's prepared defenses in order to isolate its forward forces from reinforcement.
Consisting of two or more tank and motorized rifle divisions, army-level
mobile groups would also overrun important NATO objectives behind the front
lines to facilitate the advance of Soviet follow-on forces, which would
cross NSWP territory from the westernmost Soviet military districts.

The Warsaw Pact countries provide forward bases, staging areas, and interior
lines of communication for the Soviet Union against NATO. Peacetime access
to East European territory under the Warsaw Pact framework has enabled the
Soviet military to pre- position troops, equipment, and supplies and to
make reinforcement plans for wartime. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union increased
road and rail capacity and built new airfields and pipelines in Eastern
Europe. However, a quick Soviet victory through deep strike could be complicated
by the fact that the attacking forces would have to achieve almost total
surprise. Past Soviet mobilizations for relatively small actions in Czechoslovakia,
Afghanistan, and Poland took an average of ninety days, while United States
satellites observed the entire process. Moreover, the advance notification
of large-scale troop movements, required under agreements made at the CSCE,
would also complicate the concealment of mobilization. Yet the Soviet Union
could disguise its offensive deployments against NATO as semi annual troop
rotations in the GSFG, field exercises, or preparations for intervention
against an ally.

The Role of the Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Countries in Soviet Military
Strategy

The Warsaw Pact has no multilateral command or decision- making structure
independent of the Soviet Army. NSWP forces would fight in Soviet, rather
than joint Warsaw Pact, military operations. Soviet military writings about
the alliances of World War I and World War II, as well as numerous recent
works marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact in 1985, reveal
the current Soviet view of coalition warfare. The Warsaw Pact's chief of
staff, A. I. Gribkov, has written that centralized strategic control, like
that the Red Army exercised over the allied East European national units
between 1943 and 1945 is valid today for the Warsaw Pact's JAF (see The
Organization of East European National Units, 1943-45, this Appendix).

Soviet military historians indicate that the East European allies did
not establish or direct operations on independent national fronts during
World War II. The East European forces fought in units, at and below the
army level, on Soviet fronts and under the Soviet command structure. The
headquarters of the Soviet Supreme High Command exercised control over all
allied units through the Soviet General Staff. At the same time, the commanders
in chief of the allied countries were attached to and "advised"
the Soviet Supreme High Command. There were no special coalition bodies
to make joint decisions on operational problems. A chart adapted from a
Soviet journal indicates that the Soviet- directed alliance in World War
II lacked a multilateral command structure independent of the Red Army's
chain of command, an arrangement that also reflects the current situation
in the Warsaw Pact (see fig. C, this Appendix). The Warsaw Pact's lack of
a wartime command structure independent of the Soviet command structure
is clear evidence of the subordination of the NSWP armies to the Soviet
Army.

Since the early 1960s, the Soviet Union has used the Warsaw Pact to prepare
non-Soviet forces to take part in Soviet Army operations in the European
theater of war. In wartime the Warsaw Pact commander in chief and chief
of staff would transfer NSWP forces, mobilized and deployed under the Warsaw
Pact aegis, to the operational control of the Soviet ground forces. After
deployment the Soviet Union could employ NSWP armies, comprised of various
East European divisions, on its fronts (see Glossary). In joint Warsaw Pact
exercises, the Soviet Union has detached carefully selected, highly reliable
East European units, at and below the division-level, from their national
command structures. These specific contingents are trained for offensive
operations within Soviet ground forces divisions. NSWP units, integrated
in this manner, would fight as component parts of Soviet armies on Soviet
fronts.

The East European countries play specific roles in Soviet strategy against
NATO based on their particular military capabilities. Poland has the largest
and best NSWP air force that the Soviet Union could employ in a theater
air offensive. Both Poland and East Germany have substantial naval forces
that, in wartime, would revert to the command of the Soviet Baltic Fleet
to render fire support for Soviet ground operations. These two Soviet allies
also have amphibious forces that could carry out assault landings along
the Baltic Sea coast into NATO's rear areas. While its mobile groups would
penetrate deep into NATO territory, the Soviet Union would entrust the less
reliable or capable East European armies, like those of Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
and Bulgaria, with a basically defensive mission. The East European countries
are responsible for securing their territory, Soviet rear areas, and lines
of communication. The air defense systems of all NSWP countries are linked
directly into the Soviet Air Defense Forces command. This gives the Soviet
Union an impressive early warning network against NATO air attacks.

The Reliability of the Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Armies

The Soviet Union counts on greater cooperation from its Warsaw Pact allies
in a full-scale war with NATO than in intra- alliance policing actions.
Nevertheless, the Soviets expect that a protracted war in Europe would strain
the cohesion of the Warsaw Pact. This view may derive from the experience
of World War II, in which Nazi Germany's weak alliance partners, Romania,
Hungary, and Bulgaria, left the war early and eventually joined the Soviet
side. A stalemate in a protracted European war could lead to unrest, endanger
communist party control in Eastern Europe, and fracture the entire Soviet
alliance system. NSWP reliability would also decline, requiring the Soviet
Army to reassign its own forces to carry out unfulfilled NSWP functions
or even to occupy a noncompliant ally's territory.

Continuing Soviet concern over the combat reliability of its East European
allies influences, to a great extent, the employment of NSWP forces under
Soviet strategy. Soviet military leaders believe that the Warsaw Pact allies
would be most likely to remain loyal if the Soviet Army engaged in a short,
successful offensive against NATO, while deploying NSWP forces defensively.
Under this scenario, the NSWP allies would absorb the brunt of NATO attacks
against Soviet forces on East European territory. Fighting in Eastern Europe
would reinforce the impression among the NSWP countries that their actions
constituted a legitimate defense against outside attack. The Soviet Union
would still have to be selective in deploying the allied armies offensively.
For example, the Soviet Union would probably elect to pit East German forces
against non-German NATO troops along the central front. Other NSWP forces
that the Soviet Union employed offensively would probably be interspersed
with Soviet units on Soviet fronts to increase their reliability. The Soviet
Union would not establish separate East European national fronts against
NATO. Independent NSWP fronts would force the Soviet Union to rely too heavily
on its allies to perform well in wartime. Moreover, independent East European
fronts could serve as the basis for a territorial defense strategy and successful
resistance to future Soviet policing actions in Eastern Europe.

Soviet concern over the reliability of its Warsaw Pact allies is also
reflected in the alliance's military-technical policy, which is controlled
by the Soviets. The Soviet Union has given the East European allies less
modern, though still effective, weapons and equipment to keep their armies
several steps behind the Soviet Army. The Soviets cannot modernize the East
European armies without concomitantly improving their capability to resist
Soviet intervention.

MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND THE WARSAW PACT

As a result of its preponderance in the alliance, the Soviet Union has
imposed a level of standardization in the Warsaw Pact that NATO cannot match.
Standardization in NATO focuses primarily on the compatibility of ammunition
and communications equipment among national armies. By contrast, the Soviet
concept of standardization involves a broad complex of measures aimed at
achieving "unified strategic views on the general character of a future
war and the capabilities for conducting it." The Soviet Union uses
the Warsaw Pact framework to bring its allies into line with its view of
strategy, operations, tactics, organizational structure, service regulations,
field manuals, documents, staff procedures, and maintenance and supply activities.

The Weapons and Equipment of the Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Armies

By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had achieved a degree of technical interoperability
among the allied armies that some observers would consider to be a significant
military advantage over NATO. However, the Soviet allies had weapons and
equipment that were both outdated and insufficient in number. As one Western
analyst has pointed out, the NSWP armies remain fully one generation behind
the Soviet Union in their inventories of modern equipment and weapons systems
and well below Soviet norms in force structure quantities. Although T-64
and T-72 tanks had become standard and modern infantry combat vehicles,
including the BMP-1, comprised two-thirds of the armored infantry vehicles
in Soviet Army units deployed in Eastern Europe, the NSWP armies still relied
primarily on older T-54 and T-55 tanks and domestically produced versions
of Soviet BTR-50 and BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. The East European
air forces did not receive the MiG-23, first built in 1971, until the late
1970s, and they still did not have the most modern Soviet ground attack
fighter-bombers, like the MiG-25, MiG-27, and Su-24, in the mid- to late
1980s. These deficiencies called into question NSWP capabilities for joining
in Soviet offensive operations against NATO and indicated primarily a rear-area
role for the NSWP armies in Soviet strategy.

Within the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union decides which of the allies
receive the most up-to-date weapons. Beginning in the late 1960s and early
1970s, the Soviet Union provided the strategically located Northern Tier
countries, East Germany and Poland especially, with greater quantities of
advanced armaments. By contrast, the less important Southern Tier, consisting
of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, received used equipment that was being
replaced in Soviet or Northern Tier forces. In the mid- 1970s, overall NSWP
force development slowed suddenly as the Soviet Union became more interested
in selling arms to earn hard currency and gain greater influence in the
Third World, particularly in the oil-rich Arab states of the Middle East.
At the same time, growing economic problems in Eastern Europe made many
Third World countries look like better customers for Soviet arms sales.
Between 1974 and 1978, the Soviet Union sent the equivalent of US$18.5 million
of a total US$27 million in arms transfers outside the Warsaw Pact. Moreover,
massive Soviet efforts to replace heavy Arab equipment losses in the 1973
war against Israel and the 1982 Syrian-Israeli air war over Lebanon came
largely at the expense of modernization for the East European allies. In
the late 1980s, the NSWP countries clearly resented the fact that some Soviet
Third World allies, including Algeria, Libya, and Syria, had taken delivery
of the newest Soviet weapons systems, such as the MiG-25, not yet in their
own inventories. The Soviet Union probably looked at a complete modernization
program for the NSWP armies as unnecessary and prohibitively costly for
either it or its allies to undertake.

Coordination of Arms Production

The Soviet Union claims the right to play the leading role in the Warsaw
Pact on the basis of its scientific, technical, and economic preponderance
in the alliance. The Soviet Union also acknowledges its duty to cooperate
with the NSWP countries by sharing military-technical information and developing
their local defense industries. This cooperation, however, amounts to Soviet
control over the supply of major weapons systems and is an important aspect
of Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact allies. Warsaw Pact military-technical
cooperation prevents the NSWP countries from adopting autonomous policies
or otherwise defying Soviet interests through a national defense capability
based on domestic arms production. In discussions of the United States and
NATO, the Soviets acknowledge that standardization and control of arms purchases
are effective in increasing the influence of the leading member of an alliance
over its smaller partners. In the same way, Soviet arms supplies to Eastern
Europe have made the NSWP military establishments more dependent on the
Soviet Union. To deny its allies the military capability to successfully
resist a Soviet invasion, the Soviet Union does not allow the NSWP countries
to produce sufficient quantities or more than a few kinds of weapons for
their national armies.

Romania is the only Warsaw Pact country that has escaped Soviet military-technical
domination. In the late 1960s, Romania recognized the danger of depending
on the Soviet Union as its sole source of military equipment and weapons.
As a result, Romania initiated heavy domestic production of relatively low-
technology infantry weapons and began to seek non-Soviet sources for more
advanced armaments. Romania has produced British transport aircraft, Chinese
fast-attack boats, and French helicopters under various coproduction and
licensing arrangements. Romania has also produced a fighter-bomber jointly
with Yugoslavia. However, Romania still remains backward in its military
technology because both the Soviet Union and Western countries are reluctant
to transfer their most modern weapons to it. Each side must assume that
any technology given to Romania could end up in enemy hands.

Apart from Romania, the Soviet Union benefits from the limited military
production of its East European allies. It has organized an efficient division
of labor among the NSWP countries in this area. Czechoslovakia and East
Germany, in particular, are heavily industrialized and probably surpass
the Soviet Union in their high-technology capabilities. The Northern Tier
countries produce some Soviet heavy weapons, including older tanks, artillery,
and infantry combat vehicles on license. However, the Soviet Union generally
restricts its allies to the production of a relatively narrow range of military
equipment, including small arms, munitions, communications, radar, optical,
and other precision instruments and various components and parts for larger
Soviet-designed weapons systems.

* * *

The 1980s have witnessed a dramatic increase in the amount of secondary
source material published about the Warsaw Pact. The works of Alex Alexiev,
Andrzej Korbonski, and Condoleezza Rice, as well as various Soviet writers,
provide a complete picture of the Soviet alliance system and the East European
military establishments before the formation of the Warsaw Pact. William
J. Lewis's The Warsaw Pact: Arms, Doctrine, and Strategy is a very
useful reference work with considerable information on the establishment
of the Warsaw Pact and the armies of its member states. The works of Malcolm
Mackintosh, a long-time observer of the Warsaw Pact, cover the changes in
the Warsaw Pact's organizational structure and functions through the years.
Christopher D. Jones's Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe: Political
Autonomy and the Warsaw Pact and subsequent articles provide a coherent
interpretation of the Soviet Union's use of the Warsaw Pact to control its
East European allies. In "The Warsaw Pact at 25," Dale R. Herspring
examines intra- alliance politics in the PCC and East European attempts
to reduce Soviet domination of the Warsaw Pact. Soviet military journals
are the best source for insights into the East European role in Soviet military
strategy. Daniel N. Nelson and Ivan Volgyes analyze East European reliability
in the Warsaw Pact. Nelson takes a quantitative approach to this ephemeral
topic. By contrast, Volgyes uses a historical and political framework to
draw his conclusions on the reliability issue. The works of Richard C. Martin
and Daniel S. Papp present thorough discussions of Soviet policies on arming
and equipping the NSWP allies. (For further information and complete citations,
see Bibliography.)